I have you have a home network like myself you will probably create network shares from time to time to manage all your data. Although this can be done within Windows itself this isn’t always as easy as it should be. I, for instance, had some problems with Windows Vista and remembering passwords for Samba share on a NAS (Synology DS-207+) after a reboot. Next to that, creating permanent shares may clutter your My Computer folder if you have a lot of them. Having a lot of active shares will also cause for extra bandwidth and resource usage because Windows monitors these active shares.

I found a great little program called Network Drive Mapper. It’s a single executable that doesnt need to be installed, it will save it’s settings in a separate file and is therefor completely portable. You can add shares by name or IP including passwords and choose to reconnect automatically after reboot or map / unmap any of the shares manually.